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The political prospects for Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, could hardly have looked worse on May 27, 2023, when the state’s House of Representatives, dominated by Republicans, voted 121–23 to impeach him. After an investigation that lasted months, fuelled by eight whistle-blowers on his own staff, the legislators concluded that Paxton had taken bribes from a real-estate developer, improperly fired aides who reported his conduct, and obstructed justice. Following the impeachment vote, he was immediately suspended from office.

Undaunted, Paxton, who has denied any wrongdoing, called his accusers “corrupt politicians,” won acquittal in a state Senate trial, and returned to the offensive, filing dozens of lawsuits against the Biden Administration and what he called “woke” targets across Texas. He urged Texas schools to set aside time for prayer and directed that “any public or secondary school” display in every classroom the Ten Commandments—“the moral foundation that shaped our nation.” He persisted even after his wife of thirty-eight years, Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on what she called “biblical grounds,” an apparent reference to an alleged extramarital affair (which he denied) that was central to his impeachment trial. His wife’s name was subsequently removed from his official biography.

In Trumpian fashion, Paxton is wearing the attacks on his character and his record like a victory sash, declaring himself “the fighter they couldn’t cancel,” as he tries to deny Senator John Cornyn a fifth term in office, by challenging him in the March 3rd Republican primary. Paxton’s campaign website frames his story this way: “They tried to take him down. Now, he’s taking a sledgehammer to the D.C. Establishment.” Most recent polls show him with a narrow lead. Cornyn has several other challengers, and it appears likely that no candidate will win a majority, which would prompt a runoff on May 26th.

Cornyn is surely aware that Paxton is popular among the MAGA faithful, while he is often branded as an establishment figure too long in the saddle. Yet, he, too, is trying to portray himself as close to Donald Trump, who is seen favorably by more than eighty per cent of Texas Republicans. The opening image on Cornyn’s website is a photo of the two men together, both of them giving a thumbs-up. The text proclaims, “SEN. JOHN CORNYN VOTES WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP 99% OF THE TIME.” Cornyn, who called Paxton “Crooked Ken” and a “wife cheater and fraud” in a recent ad, has also been saying that Paxton’s “blatant record of corruption” would be devastating to the G.O.P. in the midterms, which historically favor the party out of power. At a recent campaign event with the former Republican governor Rick Perry, Cornyn predicted an “Election Day massacre” if Paxton is the nominee.

Watching closely are the Democrats, who haven’t won a U.S. Senate seat in Texas since Lloyd Bentsen was elected in 1988. They last came close in 2018, when Beto O’Rourke trailed Ted Cruz by just 2.6 points, or about two hundred and fifteen thousand votes out of more than eight million cast. Joshua Blank, who designs and conducts polls for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed to Trump’s declining popularity since his reëlection as a liability for the Republicans heading into the general election. Studying numbers from 2018, when Democrats picked up forty seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, he told me, “I see an electorate here that is more dissatisfied with the President than they were then, and significantly more dissatisfied with the economy.”

But a win by one of the leading Democrats running for Cornyn’s seat—Representative Jasmine Crockett and state legislator James Talarico, who face off in their own primary on Tuesday—is still viewed as a longshot, at least by Republicans. “If I had a dollar for every time someone talked about turning Texas blue, I could buy Fox News,” Governor Greg Abbott, who is favored to win a fourth term in November, said the other day. “There’s no chance they’re going to win the election.”

The Senate race is just one drama in a particularly lively campaign season in Texas, where Republicans are laboring to make good on their effort to carve five more Republican congressional seats out of the state’s thirty-eight districts—a bid pushed by Trump. The President was in Corpus Christi on Friday to discuss energy policy and to boost the Republican candidates. Cornyn flew with him from Washington on Air Force One and posted a photo from the cabin, but Trump, in remarks delivered just hours before he announced the attack on Iran, did not offer any endorsement. “You’re in a little race together,” he said, introducing Paxton and Cornyn. “It’s going to be an interesting one, right? They’re both great people, too.”

Whether the mid-decade gerrymandering will work is an open question. Blank noted that the maps were drawn on the basis of the 2024 election, when Trump was leading the G.O.P ticket against a waning Democratic Administration in Washington. Elections since then have shown Democrats outperforming expectations in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida. Latino voters have swung back toward the Democrats in a number of districts, a fact that drew attention in Texas, where about one in three registered voters is Latino, a demographic that delivered key support to Trump in 2024.

On January 31st, a small blue wave hit North Texas, where, in a special election to fill a state Senate seat vacated when the incumbent resigned to become the Texas comptroller, the Democrat Taylor Rehmet defeated a much-better-financed, Trump-supported opponent by fourteen points in a district that Trump had won by seventeen. No Democrat had won the seat in nearly fifty years. There, too, surveys indicated a strong Democratic swing in Latino precincts, compared with the vote in 2022, the previous time the seat was contested. I asked Mike Madrid, a Republican political strategist in California who co-hosts the podcast “The Latino Vote Podcast,” what he was seeing. He believes that Latinos, a diverse group largely untethered to one political party, are voting their frustrations with Trump. In 2024, it was Democrats who had failed to deliver, as they saw it, particularly on the economy and the border. Now that the Republicans are in power, it seems that they are the ones coming up lacking. “There’s no other way to splice the data,” Madrid said. “Does that hold through November? I don’t know.”

One voter I spoke with, whose views seem to support Madrid’s analysis, is Mario Guerrero, a thirty-three-year-old construction-company owner in Edinburg, Texas, about twenty miles north of the border with Mexico, where trade between the two countries has long been an essential component of the region’s economic well-being. He has always voted a straight Republican ticket, and he voted for Trump in 2024, calling the Biden Administration’s approach to immigration “ridiculous.” But he told me that he is done with Republicans: “I am not going to vote Republican, and I can guarantee you that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people that feel the same way.” He continued, “Nothing that is happening has actually helped our economy. Money doesn’t stretch as far anymore.”

Guerrero, who is the C.E.O. of the South Texas Builders Association, said that raids and detentions by ICE and Border Patrol agents in the area have caused fear not just among Latinos but among Asian Americans and other immigrants who are in the country legally. The building business has slowed because of fear among workers, uncertainty among developers and buyers, and the rising prices of materials resulting from Trump’s tariffs. He is indignant that federal agents are not focussing on violent criminals, as he thought Trump had promised to do. “They’re stopping people because they’re brown. They’re stopping people because they have a work truck. That’s not the America we know, man. That’s not the America that we love. This is not what I voted for.”

In the border city of Laredo, I heard something similar from Angel Garcia, a firefighter who voted for Trump in 2024. He was seated under a canopy near an early-voting site, dressed in a Gold’s Gym T-shirt, urging voters to support a down-ballot Democratic candidate. “I was all for tightening the border, but not this much,” Garcia said. He added that tariffs are hurting the region. Reflecting on his 2024 vote, he said he was tired of Joe Biden and was dismissive of Kamala Harris. And now? “Same hell under new management. Different devil.”

As for the Senate primary, Garcia acknowledges that Cornyn has useful seniority, while Paxton has “too much baggage.” If the November race were to be Paxton versus Crockett, Garcia would choose Crockett. He’s not sure if he’d choose Talarico, because he doesn’t know much about him.

The area’s longtime representative in the House is another Democrat, Henry Cuellar, who represents the Twenty-eighth District, one of the five that Republicans aim to flip. His territory stretches more than two hundred miles north of the border to a portion of San Antonio and its suburbs. Born in Laredo, he served in the Texas House and, briefly, as secretary of state, before winning a seat in Congress in 2004. Considered a conservative Democrat, he opposes abortion rights and, in February, was the only Democrat in the House to vote for the SAVE America Act, which would impose strict new proof-of-citizenship requirements during voter registration. Opponents say that the measure is thinly disguised voter suppression.

I met with Cuellar at the Laredo Country Club, where he had just attended an event celebrating Senator Ted Cruz as Mr. South Texas, particularly for his work in delivering money to expand bridge traffic across the Rio Grande. (Laredo is the third-busiest port of entry in the United States, having recently dropped from the first. On a busy day, twenty thousand trucks cross the border there.) When I asked Cuellar about the newly redrawn maps, he smiled and said that he’s not worried.

Cuellar has beaten previous challengers, most recently in 2024, after federal prosecutors charged him with bribery and money laundering, alleging in a fifty-four-page indictment that he had accepted six hundred thousand dollars from an Azerbaijani energy company and a Mexican bank. Prosecutors said that the money was routed through shell companies controlled by Cuellar’s wife, Imelda, who was also charged. The congressman’s former campaign manager and a consultant pleaded guilty to helping the Cuellars launder more than two hundred thousand dollars. Cuellar denied the charges against him and his wife. “I have always made decisions guided by ethics, the law, and what is right for my district,” he said, adding, “the way this case was initiated and pursued reflects troubling missteps that should concern anyone who values fairness and due process.” Cuellar’s lawyer said that his actions were lawful and “entirely consistent with the actions of many of his colleagues.” In December, the Cuellars were unexpectedly pardoned by Trump, who said that they had been badly treated by Biden’s “weaponized” Department of Justice. But, after the pardon, Trump accused Cuellar of “Such a lack of LOYALTY,” suggesting that he had hoped the congressman would switch parties to help preserve the G.O.P.’s majority.

Cuellar is confident that he will be reëlected, because of three economic negatives that he blames on Trump. He pointed to the impact of tariffs, which have slowed trade with Mexico; doubts about the President’s intentions regarding a new trade agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada; and ICE activity. “We’ve got extra winds at our back,” he said, of the Democrats, after visiting earlier that morning in Laredo with Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader. (Jeffries was there for the annual El Abrazo celebration of unity with the city’s Mexican neighbors, in which officials from both countries meet in the middle of a bridge on the Rio Grande.)

Trump won Webb County, home to Laredo, in 2024, becoming the first Republican Presidential nominee to do so in more than a century. But, Cuellar pointed to Democratic victories in every other race in the county. “It’s not a paradigm shift,” he said. “Hispanics voted for Trump and then they voted for Democrats down-ballot—the sheriffs, the county commissioners.” He also argued that the new map for his district, which is designed to add enough Republican voters to make it three points more favorable to the G.O.P., is actually slightly more Democratic by another measure, called the Texas Partisan Index, which projects how voters in each district are likely to cast their votes based on the past three federal-election cycles.

Across town, Jorge Tovar, the pastor of the Jordan River Church and the vice-chair of the Webb County Republicans, was thinking about the Senate race as he put up a lawn sign that read “Vote Biblical Values” in front of three wooden crosses outside the church. Tovar is a former Democrat who switched parties during Trump’s first term. He has faith in Trump, whom he calls “a repented person” who has “filled his Cabinet with godly people. He declared this nation again is a Christian nation.”

Paxton, Cornyn, and the third leading Republican candidate in the Senate race, Representative Wesley Hunt, have all injected religion into their campaigns, emphasizing the primacy of Christianity, in part by targeting Muslims in their rhetoric. Abbott fuelled this narrative in November, by declaring that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the country’s most prominent Muslim-advocacy organizations, is a foreign terrorist organization that aims to impose Sharia law on Americans. A CAIR official called the allegations “defamatory” and said the order “has no basis in law or fact,” adding that Abbott’s office “has spent months stoking anti-Muslim hysteria.” Muslims make up about two per cent of Texas’s population.

Under the motto of “protecting Texas values,” Cornyn has been particularly vociferous, fighting what he calls “political Islam” and “Islamic front groups.” In February, his campaign’s X account posted “Stand against radical Islam and vote John Cornyn for Texas!” (Soon after, Laura Loomer, the MAGA influencer, who supports Paxton, attacked Cornyn, unearthing a video where he wished Muslims a “good fast” during Ramadan. She called it “totally disqualifying” and wrote, “a great way to stop Sharia Law from spreading in Texas is to make sure John Cornyn isn’t re-elected.”)

As Joshua Blank, the pollster, sees it, a reason the candidates are attacking Muslims is that border issues have lost their potency. The share of Republicans voters who once listed immigration and border security as their most important state issues has been nearly cut in half since Trump took office, with inflation, the economy, and “moral decline” now rating highly. “It’s a way to raise the same issues that are raised by immigration, about culture and changes and the primacy of Christianity,” Blank said. A similar strategy seemed to be at work when Trump renewed his attacks on Somali Americans, who are predominantly Muslim, during his State of the Union address last week. “Importing these cultures,” Trump said, means that “it is the American people who pay the price.” He vowed, to sustained applause, “We’re going to take care of this problem. We are not playing games.”

It remains to be seen, of course, how voters’ assessments of Trump’s policies and tactics will play out in November, in races at all levels. At a rally in support of postal workers, in San Antonio, I asked Gina Hinojosa, a state representative who is the front-runner in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, what the battle between Paxton and Cornyn might signal for the general election. She sees an opportunity for Democrats, but said she has no theory about which Republican would help them more: Paxton with his tarnished record, or Cornyn, who may not be able to count on support from the G.O.P. base. “In 2026, theories mean nothing,” she said. “Everything is upside down.” ♦

When it’s time, let me walk where the gray moon
is light enough to lead. I’ll need nothing more.
No streetlight. Not a star in the chilling sky.
My breath will be moonlight then, one step,
maybe two, no more. All I need to steer by.
I will learn, gray moon, how we disappear.

Kadir Nelson’s painting for the cover of the March 9, 2026, issue was inspired by the frigid temperatures and heavy snowfall that have swept across much of the country recently. Last week, parts of New York City saw nearly two feet in a span of twenty-four hours, and bright blue skies the following day.

For more covers about winter, see below:

“Warm Front,” by Lorenzo Mattotti

“Under the Weather,” by Benoît van Innis

“Winter Sun,” by Tom Gauld

Find covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.

Keeping Cough
Keeping Cough is a pertussis infection caused by holding in a productive cough owing to the fear of being perceived as having some form of coronavirus. The result is an eventual cough that produces a sound comparable to a car backfiring through a bag of gelatine. Psychological treatment for anxiety and increased masking in public are in many cases sufficient to treat this unfortunate buildup of phlegm and embarrassment.

Theraphonia
This is a condition in which patients (typically those who have undergone professional psychological assessment, but not always) have inappropriate outbursts of “therapy speak” in everyday conversation. A simple jerk, asshole, or meanie becomes a “sociopath” or “textbook narcissist.” Disagreement becomes “gaslighting.” Requesting that someone clean up after themselves is “abuse.” These patients often have trouble maintaining close relationships except with other sufferers, in which case those relationships are routinely, to quote, “extremely toxic.”

Blue Raspberry Lung
Blue Raspberry or “Blue Razz” Lung is a respiratory infirmity frequently co-morbid with the more typical bronchiolitis obliterans, or “popcorn lung.” Symptoms include frequent non-urinary rest-room trips, constant utterances of “bro” or “bruh,” a persistent sweet aroma, and a lung capacity similar to that of a common hamster. When co-morbid with popcorn lung, this illness results in X-ray showing lungs that have a distinctive trail-mix-like appearance. With immediate cessation or a switch to a less delicious flavor like “tobacco,” recovery is highly likely.

E.D.M. Clubfoot
A podiatric ailment, E.D.M. Clubfoot is usually identified by noticeable and complete pedal-arch collapse in patients. This condition is linked to prolonged periods of time in inexpensive and constricting platform boots. Other symptoms include foot fungus, irregular blood flow, and “Let’s just take an Uber. ” Treatment options include specialized footwear and, routinely, comprehensive addiction counselling.

Storiasis
Also known as “exzuma,” this skin malady is usually first identified from multiple Instagram stories or other social-media posts depicting various travel destinations in a very short length of time. Indicative captions from patients include “Take me back!” and “[Location] owes me nothing.” A chronic inflammatory dermal condition, Storiasis is often caused by lack of sunscreen, constant exposure to foreign pathogens, and excessive alcohol consumption.

Oxytocin Dependence
With the rise of more open-relationship structures, Oxytocin Dependence has been reported at startling levels in certain social groups. Symptoms vary wildly but can include hyper-promiscuity and “We’re always looking for a third,” to the more insidious “Monogamy is actually unnatural” and “Where my hug at?” Withdrawals can be brutal, and decidedly non-sexual/sensual/physical support is crucial during these times.

Doubt
Frequently observed among the mega-rich or other groups who overindulge, this chronic psychological condition is characterized by a general sense that any thing or concept may not be real. Distinct from ennui, generalized anxiety, and depression, doubt-sufferers pathologically seek to disprove facts, particularly if they do not align with previously held beliefs. This ailment has been exacerbated exponentially by obsessive use of artificial intelligence that makes patients believe they’re some sort of uniquely aware demigod.

Polio
Increased vaccine hesitancy has resulted in the resurgence of polio, particularly in the “crunchy mom” and “raw milk” communities. Polio can attack the nervous system and can lead to irreversible paralysis and occasionally death due to respiratory failure. The solution for this has been well known and well studied since the mid-twentieth century, and yet here we are. ♦

The tree house I lived in that summer was decidedly unspectacular. It was more of a tree hovel, really. The floor was a large sheet of graffitied plywood, and the roof was covered with a pair of heavy plastic tarps. Under those tarps was a small camping tent, in theory to keep out mosquitoes and mice, although at some point mice chewed a hole through it, allowing mosquitoes to sneak through as well. Outside the tent were a few Tupperware tubs containing dried and canned food, a small library (Naomi Klein, Andreas Malm, Plato), and a collection of goofy wigs and disguises. The branches of the tree were festooned with protest banners, wooden crates, and homemade art. Underneath the tree house was a large cargo net suspended from the tree’s four main branches. On hot afternoons, I would lie on my back on that net, some forty feet off the ground, feeling the warm wind move beneath me, and muse about how to save the world. It didn’t seem quite so far-fetched up there. Lofty thoughts naturally sprouted to fill the empty space.

The tree house was situated in an unlovely strip of forest a few hundred yards wide, squeezed between a six-lane highway and a freight rail line, on the drab gray edge of Vancouver. Cars flowed by at all hours, creating a wash of noise broken now and then by the metallic din of passing trains. It was hideous, really, this forgotten little corner of the modern world. At times, the smell of car exhaust wafted so thickly into the tree house that I would resort to sleeping with an N95 mask clamped over my face, for fear of all those particulates. I would awaken to find that, in the cold night air, a slime of dew had formed on the inside of it, as on a cave wall.

But then the tree house was not designed for beauty, or enjoyment, or whimsy. It was a tool. Its purpose was to block the construction of an oil pipeline slated to run along that narrow tract of land. This tool functioned only so long as a person was inside it; otherwise, pipeline workers would swoop in and quickly demolish it. However, no single person could stay up in the tree indefinitely. So, once every few days, a new “tree-sitter” would arrive to swap in for the previous one, in a rotating roster. I was one such tree-sitter.

In the summer and fall of 2021, I put in seven shifts in the tree house, totalling about a month—though, up there, it felt much longer. Meals were sometimes brought to me by volunteers, who would deliver them to the base of the tree and clip them to the end of a haul rope. Some days, I had to fend for myself, heating up cans of lentil soup or packets of vegetable curry over a camping stove. I peed into an old milk jug, which I later emptied into a nearby stream; solid waste went into a garbage bag filled with sawdust, which I lugged away at the end of each stint.

At first, I struggled to fill the voluminous hours; then I learned to luxuriate in them. I finally read “Middlemarch,” one of those classics I’d always intended to get around to once I found the time. I also started meditating. There was a small balcony on one side of the tree house, and two or three times a day I would sit there cross-legged for the better part of an hour, with my gaze loosely focussed on the young maple leaves at my eye line. At times, the leaves would melt together, and I would feel myself on the cusp of an Emersonian dissolution into the wild green multiplicity—and then a train horn would blast or a motorcycle engine would roar, shattering my concentration, and I would be, once again, just a weird guy hanging out in a tree.

Imoved from Manhattan to British Columbia in 2013. Not long after, I began reading stories about a plan to build an oil pipeline that would carry diluted bitumen from the nation’s interior to a port just outside Vancouver, where it would be shipped across the Salish Sea, a body of water I and countless other creatures swam in each morning. I had to look up what “bitumen” was; it turns out to be an especially heavy, sticky type of petroleum that requires immense amounts of energy to extract. (Imagine a cup of road tar poured into a child’s sandbox and stirred around for a couple million years; now imagine trying to get that tar back out.) The new pipeline, the government said, would enable Canada to sell more bitumen overseas (mainly to China), rather than selling nearly all of it to the U.S., as we had previously done. This would allow us to fetch higher prices for the oil and give us greater independence from our smaller, wealthier, and far more militarized southern neighbor. In retrospect, the plan was both surprisingly prescient and suicidally myopic, depending on whether one is thinking on the timescale of a decade or a century, and whether one believes climate scientists when they say, with a note of rising panic, that burning huge amounts of oil to extract and transport even huger amounts of oil around the world is not a wise thing to do, planetarily speaking.

The saga of this pipeline project, which was known as the Trans Mountain Expansion, or TMX, is now familiar to most Canadians as a fiasco of epic proportions. Technically, TMX was not a new pipeline but, rather, a six-hundred-mile stretch of pipe that would be “twinned” along the length of an older one; when completed, it would nearly triple the old pipeline’s capacity. In 2018, faced with fierce opposition from environmentalists and First Nations groups, Kinder Morgan, the company that had been trying to build this pipeline, decided that it would be too difficult and expensive to finish. Rather than allow the project to die a natural death, Justin Trudeau, then the nation’s Liberal Prime Minister, announced that he would use taxpayer money to purchase it so that the government could force it through, cost be damned. This announcement occurred less than twenty-four hours after his government had declared that the nation was facing a “climate emergency.”

In March of 2021, I read a story about a handful of blockaders who had built a tree house along the pipeline’s proposed route, hoping to halt its advance. The tree house had been an elaborate affair, with six giant glass windows made from scavenged shower doors. (“It was so extra,” one of the blockaders later told me.) One day, the protesters briefly left it unoccupied, and the pipeline workers tore it down. The blockaders then built another, more minimalist structure in a nearby tree. By the time I learned about them, they had been occupying this rude hut in the sky for three months, vowing to remain in it until the pipeline was cancelled. I reached out to the blockaders through Signal, hoping to interview them for a book I was writing. After some initial hesitancy—they were, understandably, paranoid about government spies infiltrating their tight-knit cohort—they agreed to let me talk with them.

One April day, I made the three-hour drive from my home, in Halfmoon Bay, to the tree house, crossing the sea on a ferry and then weaving through the gleaming cyan towers of Vancouver. By early afternoon, I had reached the city of Burnaby. I parked outside a massive Korean grocery store, grabbed a backpack filled with climbing equipment, and walked along the shoulder of the highway. I could feel the eyes of each passing motorist scrutinizing me, skeptical of this strange human figure amid the machinescape.

After a few minutes, I spotted a small trail leading through a stand of cottonwood trees. It was blocked off with a yellow rope and a sign warning that I was now entering “a Trans Mountain project/operations site.” Ignoring the sign, I passed two portly, aging security guards wearing reflective yellow safety vests. I was worried that they would try to stop me, but they merely filmed me with their phones. Once I reached the tree house, a rope was lowered to me. I climbed up, using a harness and a pair of mechanical ascenders.

The tree was inhabited by a bearded, bespectacled man in his sixties named Tim Takaro, who often acted as a spokesman for the blockade. It was a mild, pleasant spring afternoon; sunlight slivered through branches hung with green catkins, like tiny chandeliers. Takaro opened a can of beer and sipped it while we talked. His manner of speech was genial and punctiliously intellectual—which should not have surprised me, given that he was a Yale graduate, a medical doctor, and a tenured professor of environmental health. But it nevertheless struck me as incongruous, given that he was, currently, an unwashed, barefoot eco-radical living in a tree.

One of Takaro’s chief tasks was to recruit and train new tree-sitters. The movement had about a hundred volunteers, although people continually drifted in and out; a core of about twenty individuals did most of the work. Finding dedicated tree-sitters, ones who would come back, even once the novelty had worn off and the legal risk began mounting, was a challenge. “We always need new people,” he said.

While talking with Takaro, I realized that, in some ways, I was ideally suited to the odd task of sitting in a tree and doing nothing all day. As a freelance writer, I did not need to show up to work at an office; I had no kids to tend to; my husband was accustomed to my being away on reporting trips; and, while researching my latest book, I had already learned the arcane art of climbing trees with ropes.

A decade earlier, when I was reporting on the Occupy Wall Street movement, amid the panoply of signs that people held, one in particular had pierced me. It read, simply, “Stop Gawking. Join!” Why, I wondered, had I been content to stand on the sidelines and watch while others fought for the things I believed in? Why wasn’t I sitting where Takaro was sitting?

The most obvious reason was professional—and, somewhat ironically, ethical—in nature. Traditionally, there is a bright line between journalism and activism; choosing to cross that line felt unseemly. More worrying still was the fact that I wasn’t yet a Canadian citizen; I had only a “permanent residency” card, which had to be renewed every five years. This meant that, if I were arrested, I risked being kicked out of the country. Takaro assured me that there were ways of minimizing my exposure. If arrests were imminent, he said, the police were obligated to read aloud a legal document known as an “injunction” and then give me about ten minutes to vacate the tree. So I could always run away, if need be. Ideally, of course, I wouldn’t run; I would chain myself to the tree and slow the loggers down for as long as I could. But Takaro explained that my very presence in the tree would suggest that I was a person willing to chain myself to it, which would force the police to assemble a special tactical unit to extract me. That would take time. And time—taking time from them, buying time for ourselves and the planet—was what this protest was all about.

After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to take the leap.

A few days into my first tree-sit, two young people arrived in the forest, wearing face masks and dark clothing. They began constructing a tree house in a nearby cottonwood. I watched as they lashed four long wooden beams to the tree, crosswise, like a tic-tac-toe board, then installed a plywood floor. They worked tirelessly for about six hours, sixty or so feet off the ground, with the ease of riveters atop a skyscraper.

A couple of security guards were stationed below. At one point, I heard the male climber tell them that they should be wearing helmets, in case anything accidentally fell down. In bemusement, one security guard said, “He’s telling me to be careful?”

A long rope connected the top of their tree to the top of mine—not a climbing rope but the cheap, braided-plastic kind used by crab fishermen. Around dusk, the two climbers attached mechanical ascenders to it and, hanging upside down like tree sloths, made the long, slow traverse to my platform. It gave me the willies to watch. Under that amount of strain, the teeth of their ascenders could have sawed through the rope. But they made it safely across, seemingly unfazed by the ordeal.

These two lithe, blithe creatures introduced themselves. Her name was Amanda Hehner, though here at the blockade she went by the code name Cauliflower. He, for reasons both legal and personal, asked me to refer to him in writing only as Emerald. Amanda was feline and fair-haired; Emerald had the large eyes, thick black eyebrows, and neotenous features of an anime hero. I was immediately smitten by their air of outlaw pluck. In an interview with a local reporter, Emerald once summarized the philosophy behind the blockade with perfect succinctness. “Treehouses are an analogy for humanity’s interdependence with nature,” he’d said. “Tree falls, human falls.”

“If it ever feels like I’m using too much pressure, I want you to let out a muffled yelp.”

Cartoon by Benjamin Slyngstad

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When I wasn’t living in the tree house, Emerald enlisted me to act as his sidekick on various “missions.” First, I helped him complete the construction of the second tree house. Then we hung a rickety, Indiana Jones-style rope bridge between the two so that, if need be, a tree-sitter could walk from one tree house to the other to evade the police. We also tied ropes to the tops of nearby trees so that a climber could, theoretically, move from treetop to treetop, like a spider. The notion of actually doing this—climbing from tree to tree, forty or fifty feet off the ground, on a length of plastic fishing rope—was so terrifying that I never even for a moment considered it. But Emerald was made of sterner stuff. He would routinely rappel down from the new tree house on a rope that was about ten feet too short to reach the ground; when the rope ran out, he would grab the tree trunk like a fireman’s pole and slide the rest of the way down, all in one unbroken motion. “The guy is a maniac,” Takaro told me. “But in a good way.”

In May, once the trees leafed out, our tree houses became invisible to passing cars. To attract their attention, I proposed that we hang a long banner reading “TMX PIPELINE STOPS HERE” from a giant Douglas fir beside the highway. The rest of the blockaders agreed. So, one evening, beneath the kind of pale, weirdly illumined sky one finds only on a cloudy night in a very big city—an aurora urbana, as it were—Emerald and I set out for the Doug fir. Ducking down so that passing motorists would not spot us, we crept along the roadside until we reached the tree. We used a large slingshot to fire a beanbag attached to a thin cord over the lowest branch, about eighty feet off the ground, and then, after untying the beanbag, secured a climbing rope to that end of the cord and hauled it back over the branch. We both tugged on the rope to test the branch’s strength.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’d prefer the rope be on a higher branch, so that if one branch fails, the next branch will catch you.”

“I think it’ll be fine,” Emerald said.

I watched from the shadows as he climbed the rope. When he was partway up, it began to rain lightly. Off in the distance, a white vein of lightning appeared in the lilac sky. Emerald, laughing, called down, “What a time for lightning!”

Undeterred, he kept climbing. When he reached the lowest branch, he secured himself to the trunk, then hauled up the banner. All this took the better part of an hour; I was amazed that the police didn’t show up.

Back on the ground, Emerald was wild-eyed with adrenaline. It turned out, he said, that the lowest branch had been completely dead. While he was climbing up, it could have snapped at any moment, sending him hurtling to the ground.

We paused briefly to take some photos of the banner, billowing triumphantly in the predawn breeze. Then, whooping, we dashed off into the forest.

That summer, I began using my connections in the journalism world to try to publicize our crusade. To my dismay, writers and editors didn’t seem as interested in the story as I’d assumed they would be. Aside from a steady trickle of articles on local news sites, the media’s initial interest in the blockade had largely dried up. During our strategy meetings, we were forced to continually ask ourselves: How could we make sure that our protest—which appeared to be a lost cause in an unglamorous corner of the province—garnered the attention it needed to succeed?

In a curious twist of fate, around a hundred miles from our tree houses, another protest movement had been growing, providing an enlightening counterpoint to our own. Over on Vancouver Island, a group of land defenders were fighting to stop the felling of old-growth trees in a grove called Fairy Creek, on the land of the Pacheedaht First Nation. The blockaders, led by a charismatic Pacheedaht elder named Bill Jones, had built little utopian encampments throughout the forest, drawing people from all over Canada. Tree houses were erected and roads blocked off. An eruption of violent police crackdowns followed: many protesters were brutally manhandled and pepper-sprayed, and tree-sitters were dramatically arrested by officers who dropped down from helicopters. These arrests were highly publicized, which led to more blockaders showing up and more arrests, which in turn led to more crackdowns—the kind of news-generating feedback loop that every direct-action protest movement seeks to achieve. By the end of the summer, it would become the largest act of civil unrest in Canadian history.

The logic of what attracts the news media’s interest can be quite grim. “The power of this kind of civil disobedience is directly indexed to the body’s physical vulnerability,” notes the author Olivia Laing, who participated in treetop protests in the nineteen-nineties in England. “The more dangerous or precarious a position the protester took, the more powerful its effect.” As the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis recently showed, local demonstrations often become national news only once protesters’ lives have been imperilled or, worse, extinguished. As the ugly old saying goes: If it bleeds, it leads. But aside from the grisly spectacle of police violence, why, I wondered, do some protest movements continually gain energy, grab attention, and achieve their aims, where others remain small, local, and doomed? Wanting to answer this riddle, I decided to research the history of tree-sits. I hoped to figure out what was hampering our cause—not just the pipeline protest but the climate movement more broadly.

I got in touch with tree-sitters from all over the world. I learned that the technique was being used to stop many kinds of environmental devastation. I spoke with people who had used their tree-sits to prevent the desecration of a culturally significant Native site in Northern California, the widening of a road in Los Angeles, the expansion of a parking lot in upstate New York, and the construction of a natural-gas pipeline in West Virginia. Some of these efforts succeeded; most failed. What the protesters repeatedly impressed on me was the fact that the tree-sit was not just about saving trees. “I’m not some tree-hugging fucking hippie,” an activist named Erik Hayward, who had campaigned to save native forests in Tasmania, told me. “It’s not necessarily about the individual trees. It’s about a culture change.”

The world’s most famous treetop protest began in 1997, when a young woman named Julia Butterfly Hill climbed to the top of a thousand-year-old redwood, evocatively named Luna, and remained there for an astonishing seven hundred and thirty-eight days. She was visited in the tree by the likes of Joan Baez and Woody Harrelson, and her sylphlike image appeared on televisions around the country (including my own, in suburban Illinois, when I was still an impressionable teen-ager). Ultimately, Luna was spared, along with other redwoods within a two-hundred-foot buffer zone. But the world’s most consequential tree-sit, by my estimation, is one that most Americans have never heard of. It took place in Germany’s Hambach Forest, where, starting in 2012, activists built an aerial village of tree houses in order to halt the expansion of a coal mine. Their blockade lasted eight years. The government finally relented, declaring that the remaining forest would be preserved. More importantly, the romance of the blockade seems to have darkened the German public’s opinion of the coal industry, hastening the nation’s green transition. “The tree house is symbolic,” one Hambach protester told me. “It stands for more than this world.”

My life in the tree house was for the most part uneventful, at times eerily so. Just after my first stint as a tree-sitter, in April, logging in the area was halted until August. Members of our group had successfully argued to regulators that it would affect the nesting season of the Anna’s hummingbird, an otherworldly creature with an iridescent-pink head. We celebrated by festooning the tree house with paintings of hummingbirds. I found it inspiring that a tiny bird could temporarily subdue the hydra of heavy industry. (Others were less thrilled. A writer for the conservative-leaning Calgary Herald criticized the decision in an op-ed titled “A $100-million hummingbird nest and other Trans Mountain absurdities.”) One of the strange side effects of this hiatus was that we were now protecting a forest that, at least for the next four months, wasn’t under direct threat. We kept the tree house occupied at all hours, just in case.

My time in the treetops passed in discrete chunks, broken up by trips back home, where I would swim in the sea and go for long trail runs through the forest, relishing my new freedom. When it was time to go back, I tried to appreciate the forest for its beauty, corrupted as it was. On my hikes in, I stopped to admire bumblebees drunkenly lolling in the purple blooms of invasive Himalayan balsam. From my treetop platform, I watched as nearby maple leaves unfurled, grew to dinosaurian proportions, and then desiccated. Over that long, unusually hot summer, the moss that covered the branches came to resemble the rough side of a kitchen sponge.

Halfway through the season, a cloud of wildfire smoke settled over Vancouver. I happened to be occupying the tree house that week, a piece of bad luck. The temperature exceeded a hundred degrees, and the smoke was so thick that the little cartoon icon on the air-quality app on my phone—which normally wore a cloth mask when the air was bad—now bore a gas mask. After putting on two N95s, I lay on my back most of the day, sweating and shooing flies. Kind volunteers brought me ice packs and thermoses of chilled mint tea. The public seemed to intuitively understand that the current unbearable combination of smoke and heat was a foretaste of exactly the kind of future we were fighting to prevent.

One day in August, a CBC crew arrived to mark the first anniversary of the tree-house occupation. They shot photos of me from the ground. I stood on the branches of the tree, wearing a black medical mask to hide my face. My photo later appeared on the CBC website, where I was referred to as “an unnamed protester.” I scrutinized the image. I wondered whether I would ever inspire anyone to climb a tree, the way Julia Butterfly Hill had inspired me as a kid. She was sometimes photographed clinging barefoot to the tree’s trunk, dressed all in black, like some strange hybrid of arboreal mammal and dendrite monk; I was wearing khakis.

It seems to me this is one reason that both the blockade at Fairy Creek and Hill’s efforts to save Luna spoke to the public in a way that ours did not. Put simply, what we lacked was beauty. In an old-growth forest, the beauty of old trees intertwines with the bodies of those trying to save them, creating something numinous. Land defenders will invariably be outspent and outgunned by their opponents. But this poetic aspect of environmental protest—the image of a frail human risking her life for that of a mammoth tree—is something the forces of industry will always lack.

For months, an uncanny sense of calm suffused the forest. Even after the pipeline company was legally allowed to begin cutting trees again, it held off. We could tell that the tree house was being surveilled. It was clear that a plan was being formulated, but, whatever it was, it was slow to materialize.

Finally, one day in September when I was back home, I caught word that a siege had begun. I raced to Burnaby to help organize a response. The pipeline crew had started by erecting a tall metal fence around all the areas in the forest where they planned to cut. Then they rolled in a massive white “bucket truck” with a long mechanical arm—picture the offspring of an army tank and a fire truck—which they used to lift men with chainsaws high above the ground so that they could fell trees from the top down. We called this machine the Tank.

Once the Tank had cleared a path to within a few hundred feet of our tree houses, we mobilized supporters to show up the following morning. While the police’s attention was focussed elsewhere, we strung two hammocks high in the trees, where we stationed blockaders, attaching their safety lines to fallen logs. It took the police more than a week to carefully extricate them.

What was baffling (and, indeed, perversely frustrating) was how gently the police were handling any arrests. At Fairy Creek, the police had been notoriously brutal, often pepper-spraying blockaders directly in their eyes and mouths. Those abuses caused outrage, which incited more protesters to show up. But here the police had adopted the calm, slightly imperious demeanor of Nurse Ratched dealing with a mental patient. As Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., both argued, part of the logic behind nonviolent protest is to reveal the violent nature of one’s enemy. Our opponents, apparently, knew this all too well. There was something deeply creepy about the feeling of the State slowly and gently squeezing the life out of us, so slowly and so gently that almost no one outside the movement realized it was happening.

Nevertheless, by the fifteenth day of the siege, we had managed to assemble perhaps two dozen marchers on the far side of the fence to chant, sing, beat drums, and taunt the tree-fellers. The tone was heated but surprisingly civil. “Oil is war!” a protester shouted. “This is unceded Indigenous land,” another said. An older man showed up and began blaring out a tune on a bagpipe. “This is a song from my seventh grandson, who will have to live with your shit!” he yelled. The pipeline workers, visibly agitated by our taunts, occasionally yelled back. One of them told us to get jobs, or, at the very least, to let them do theirs. “You’re all a bunch of hypocrites,” another said. “How did you get here today? Did you drive?”

They made some fair points. The oil would go to market on a train if not in a pipeline, they said, and if it didn’t come from us it would come from Russia. These arguments tended to combine frugality with futility; it was a familiar zero-sum logic. Our rhetoric, by contrast, hinged on hope and outrage, in terms that sometimes felt a bit nebulous or simplistic to me. It was impossible to explain the totalizing nature of carbon capitalism while shouting through a fence, so we simply shouted, “No new pipelines!”

At one point, I watched as a First Nations woman made an impassioned speech to a pipeline worker about the ways that the oil industry hurt Indigenous women in particular—the rapes and murders that result from man camps, the miscarriages and cancer that result from poisoned water, the ongoing loss of cultural heritage. It seemed to move him more than any of our bumper-sticker micro-diatribes about destroying the earth.

“What do you think I should do?” the worker asked her.

“Hop the fence!” she replied. “Quit your job!”

It was clear from his expression that this was not an option.

By then, I was feeling cautiously hopeful. We were recruiting more volunteers, a few of whom were willing to get arrested. A young man pretended to lock himself to a concrete block buried in the ground, and a seventy-nine-year-old woman slipped through a gap in the fence and sat down in front of the Tank. (As she was being taken away on a stretcher by police, I overheard a pipeline worker snark, “Are we calling the cops or the bus to the old folks’ home?”)

On the morning of September 23rd, the Tank advanced to within a few yards of the tree house where Emerald was stationed. Before the Tank reached the tree’s base, Emerald clipped himself to a plastic rope attached to another tree and pulled himself across to it. The Tank could not fell that tree as long as Emerald was in it, but the police knew that if they attempted to arrest him, he could simply traverse back to the tree house, playing a game of cat-and-mouse sixty feet in the air. The Tank eventually retreated, and a cheer went up among our supporters.

The next day, the turnout on our side was even higher; it seemed that a final showdown was imminent. Around noon, the Tank once again attempted to advance to the base of Emerald’s tree house, and once again he valiantly traversed into a neighboring tree. Only this time, by a stroke of terrible luck, his movements jostled loose a dead branch (what loggers call a widow-maker), and it fell, landing directly on the head of a pipeline worker below. The worker, who was fortunately wearing a helmet, was knocked to the ground. Within an hour, a police officer was announcing through a bullhorn that Emerald was under arrest for assault, and that if he didn’t come down willingly he could face additional charges. Emerald, with few options left, rappelled down to earth. The police cuffed his hands behind his back and dragged him off to jail.

In the aftermath, the energy left our movement, like a sail that begins to luff and then goes slack. Most of our supporters drifted home. A core group of us gathered in a home in Vancouver for a strategy meeting. We had run out of volunteers willing to be arrested, and we had no other way of stopping the Tank from felling the rest of the trees. Our only hope was to station someone in both tree houses, on the off chance that it would give us time to regroup. Takaro offered to occupy the newer tree house. I hesitantly volunteered to occupy the older one.

The arrangement was less than ideal. Takaro didn’t want to be arrested, because he hoped to perform another tree-sit farther along the pipeline’s proposed route. I didn’t want to be arrested, for fear of getting kicked out of the country. We agreed that we would hold off the police as long as we could, and then, at the last possible moment, we would flee. It was not the most courageous plan, but it was the only one we had.

The following morning, Takaro and I took our places in the tree houses and readied ourselves to summon volunteers. But the police didn’t make a move. The same thing happened on the second day. It was a clever tactic: since we didn’t know when they would show up, we couldn’t organize a rally, which meant that we couldn’t inspire the kind of feedback loop of repression and outrage that would get media attention and swell our ranks. They were killing us with kindness.

The next day was a Monday. We figured that the police would show up, since most of our supporters were back at work, but again they didn’t appear. It rained hard, the kind of cold, steady rain that squeezes your temples and makes your teeth ache. I hid in the tree house, in my sleeping bag, lost in a gray funk. Around five, the sun broke through the clouds, a beery yellow light that made the leaves glint like glass. Takaro called me and invited me to cross the rope bridge for a drink. I reluctantly agreed.

“We can watch a drama about a murder, a documentary about a murder, or a comedy about a murder.”

Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan

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Harness and helmet on, I swung out onto the rope bridge. The rungs were slippery with rain, and the bridge wobbled sickeningly with each step. As I made my way awkwardly across, some fifty feet in the air, a pair of security guards down below pointed high-powered flashlights at me and filmed me with their phones, hoping, I assumed, that I would get tangled up and require a humiliating rescue operation.

Eventually, I made it to the other side, slick with a mix of rain and sweat.

“Welcome!” Takaro said, giving me a hug.

I sat on a plastic bucket he had set out for me, sipping bourbon from a blue tin cup as the adrenaline in my veins dissipated. To the west of the tree house, I could now look out over the progress the pipeline workers had made so far. A corridor of felled trees had been cleared from here all the way to the nearest highway overpass. I could see the Tank parked in the distance. It now had a straight route to us.

“So what do you think?” I asked. “Will tomorrow be the end?”

“Who knows,” he said. “I’ve thought it was the end so many times now, and I’ve been wrong.”

The sun sank back into the clouds, like a white stone falling through silt. I wanted to stay longer, but I was afraid of crossing the bridge in the dark, so I roped up and carefully made my way back. I collapsed onto my sleeping bag as the rain began to fall again, and slipped into a caliginous, dreamless sleep.

I awoke at 7:30 A.M. to the insistent vibration of my cellphone. In a state of instantaneous, almost clairvoyant alertness, I opened Signal to find a cascade of recent messages.

“A big black cube van . . . just went in gate . . .”

“I think that is the tactical team. . . .”

“Green men are here.”

I called Takaro.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“What we planned. I’m going to bail out,” he said. “I suggest you do the same.”

I hung up and started frantically packing. Once I finished, I poked my head out of the tree house and watched as Takaro rappelled to the ground and walked quickly away. No police officers chased him. I looked down to find three men in camouflage vests and helmets gathered under my tree. They were soon joined by two more officers, who set up a loudspeaker to play a prerecorded recitation of the injunction. I hastily prepared to rappel down outside a metal fence that they had erected around my tree. With the police watching, I tugged my mask higher on my face, clipped into a rope, and lowered myself over the edge of the balcony. I heard one of the police call out, “The safest way might be to come down inside the fence. We’ll let you go freely!” Unfooled by this ploy (if that’s what it was), I landed outside the fence, unclipped myself, crossed a small creek, and then sprinted off into the woods. No one followed me.

My first impulse was to keep running until I reached the nearest train station, go home, and sleep for a week, but I realized that someone needed to record the destruction of the tree houses so that footage could be shared with the media. I changed into new clothes, put on a baseball cap, buried my backpack under some brush, crept out to the highway, and then reëntered the injunction zone from the far side. On my way in, I ran into a first-time protester who was wearing a thick camel-hair coat. I asked whether I could borrow it. He graciously handed it over. Mere minutes after running away as a masked crusader, I returned, in new garb, to perform my old job as a journalist. I felt like Spider-Man transforming back into Peter Parker.

By this point, the Tank had reached the base of my tree. I watched as a long mechanical arm with a man-size bucket at the end lifted up three officers, who cut down the rope bridge, sliced away the connecting ropes, and tore through the tent. They began tossing our possessions down to earth. Books, food, ropes, the collection of silly wigs: it all came raining down, landing in a giant heap. The very last thing they dropped was the jug of my urine, which landed on top of the pile, soaking it through.

Ifound Takaro nearby, sitting on the ground, his face flushed with anger. As workers dismantled the platform itself—the sliver of wood where he had lived, sweated, and shat for so many days in the course of the past year—he shouted up at them through a megaphone.

“Hundreds died this summer in the heat waves,” he said. “If this pipeline is built, millions more will die! You are killing Canadians!”

An older protester in a puffy orange jacket chided him for being too anthropocentric. “I would have liked to hear you advocate on behalf of the millions of other species who will go extinct from climate change,” he said.

Takaro smiled apologetically. “I’m a doctor,” he replied. “I have to talk about what I know.”

I asked Takaro how he was feeling.

“Rough,” he said. “But we’re both here. We lived to fight another day.”

Later, Takaro would end up in jail for about a month after staging his other tree-sit, which would prove to be our movement’s last stand. The pipeline itself was eventually completed, at a total cost of roughly thirty-four billion Canadian dollars, arguably the single largest subsidy for the oil industry in the nation’s history.

That day, as the light faded and our few remaining supporters dispersed, I balmed myself with the thought that even though most blockades fail, their effect can reverberate for decades. And indeed, in the wake of the battle against TMX—which had included not just our tree houses but numerous other blockades, most often organized by First Nations communities, all throughout B.C.—the desire to build pipelines in Canada appeared to wane. This was true in the United States as well. In 2021, the Financial Post warned that North America was becoming a “graveyard of mega pipeline projects.”

From the earth’s perspective, that pronouncement now seems almost tragically optimistic. In Canada, as elsewhere, the climate movement, after years of raucous visibility, has largely fallen into a state of uneasy quietude. The reëlection of Donald Trump and the ensuing wave of Canadian nationalism seem to have simultaneously smothered the will to pursue aggressive climate action and resuscitated the desire to build pipelines. In 2025, our new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, signed a memorandum vowing that he is “focused” on building a new pipeline to carry “at least one million barrels” of bitumen per day from Alberta to British Columbia. The press began referring to this plan as “Northern Gateway 2.0”—a nod to a previous, failed attempt to build a pipeline to B.C.’s northern coast. He has also floated the notion of renewing construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which had been cancelled in 2021. Environmentalists refer to these projects, aptly, as “zombie pipelines”: dead—and deadly—revenants rising from their graves.

If these pipeline projects are revivified, Takaro assures me, a new resistance movement, led primarily by Indigenous organizers, is almost certain to spring up once again to combat them. The blockades of the past are merely a prelude to those to come. After all, you never forget how to climb a tree. ♦

In recent weeks, remarkable things have been happening on Wall Street. As the major A.I. developers have been rolling out new versions of their models, and new work tools to sit atop them, investors have been knocking down the value of many big and profitable companies over fears that their businesses and employees will be disrupted, or displaced entirely. Hundreds of billions of dollars of value have been wiped out. Enterprise-software companies, like Salesforce and Workday; cybersecurity companies, like CrowdStrike; and wealth managers, such as Charles Schwab and Raymond James—they’ve all been hit. Early last week, selling extended to the broader market after Citrini Research, a little-known financial-research firm, posted a lengthy “thought exercise” about the impact of A.I., in which, by 2028, Citrini claims, soaring unemployment among white-collar workers will crimp consumer spending, and this will plunge the economy into a financial crisis and a recession.

Later in the week, as other analysts poked holes in the Citrini scenario, the market recovered some of its losses. But the gyrations illustrate the power of two assumptions about A.I. that go largely unquestioned, on Wall Street and elsewhere: that the new technology is so powerful that it will transform the economy utterly; and that, despite being designed by humans, it’s now a force unto itself, whose progress can’t be reshaped or redirected. In short, we are all slaves to the A.I. algorithms and their inner workings, which remain somewhat mysterious even to their creators.

When you think about it, this second assumption is both terrifying and ahistoric. In the paperback edition of their 2023 book, “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity,” Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, two M.I.T. economists, point out that the lesson of earlier economic transformations is: “you can’t stop technological change, but you can shape it.” In early British textile factories, women and children worked twelve-plus-hour days in unsanitary environments. It took the advent of factory legislation to shorten the workday and improve working conditions. And in many countries, including the United States, the rise of labor unions was a key factor in insuring that technology-driven productivity gains fed through to wage increases and expanded employment benefits as well as higher profits. The Treaty of Detroit, a five-year wage contract agreed upon by General Motors and the United Auto Workers in 1950, made this compact explicit.

Acemoglu and Johnson are leaders in their field: they shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics with a University of Chicago economist, James Robinson. In a new report for the Brookings Institution titled “Building pro-worker AI,” which Acemoglu and Johnson wrote with another noted M.I.T. economist, David Autor, they challenge the assumption of societal powerlessness in the face of A.I. They lay out a policy agenda designed to make sure that it acts as “a force magnifier for human expertise” rather than as a job killer. “We have a lot of agency, a lot of choice in shaping the future of technology,” Acemoglu told the MIT Sloan Management Review, “and different futures correspond to different winners and losers, different benefits, different costs, different productivities.”

As an example of how A.I. could be used in a pro-worker fashion, the report points to an Electrician’s Assistant (EA), developed by Schneider Electric, a French-based multinational company. When confronted by a tricky problem, the electrician feeds information and pictures into an assistant, which is a large language A.I. model. The assistant conducts a diagnosis and issues recommendations, in an iterative fashion, for how to fix the problem. It also helps the electrician file maintenance reports, and the paper cites evidence that the time spent on this task has been halved. “Tools akin to EA could be readily built to support many additional trade and modern craft workers, such as plumbers, building contractors, and health-care workers,” the report says.

This is an encouraging story, but how representative is it? For every example like the Electrician’s Assistant, there is one in which A.I. is already displacing jobs, or, at least, it’s being used as an excuse for big layoffs. Last week, Block, a financial-services platform, announced that it was getting rid of four thousand workers, out of ten thousand in total, on the ground that A.I. could do their jobs. Even in cases where companies have employed A.I. programs without engaging in mass layoffs, they have often been used to surveil and coerce workers rather than empower them. Amazon has an Associate Development and Performance Tracker program that it employs in its warehouses and always-on cameras that it deploys in its delivery vehicles, which are two notorious instances. Last week, Burger King said that it’s testing new A.I.-powered headsets, which can be used, among other things, to check whether its customer-service employees say “please” and “thank you.”

The three M.I.T. economists don’t underestimate the scale of the challenge. “None of the big companies are pouring even a small fraction of their investment into developing A.I. as a pro-human, pro-worker tool,” Acemoglu said in his interview. To reorient things, he and his colleagues make a series of policy recommendations, including changing the tax laws, fostering competition in the A.I. sector, and giving workers a direct stake in A.I. One key proposal is for the government to use its financial power—both as a provider of research grants, and as a buyer and user of technology systems—to push the development of A.I. in a pro-worker direction. In the health and education sectors, for example, which together make up about twenty-five per cent of the nation’s G.D.P., government (at the federal and local level) is a major purchaser of tech products—a position it could use to demand the development of A.I. assistants that enhance workers’ capabilities. When I called up Autor last week, to ask him about the report, he cited the opportunity for A.I. assistants to help nurses carry out more demanding medical tasks, and to help teachers offer their students personalized support. “We pay for this stuff, we use it, the welfare of our children and grandchildren depends on it,” Autor said, referring to taxpayers. “I’m not saying the government should take over A.I., but it should use its power to shape its development.”

In theory, the tax code could also be used to reshape the incentives of A.I. developers and users. When firms make investment decisions, they often have a choice of buying new labor-saving equipment, such as a chatbot, or hiring new workers and retraining existing ones. The current tax code, with its low rates on capital income and accelerated depreciation schedules, pushes businesses in the first direction. It “favors capital to an enormous extent, while it is very burdensome toward workers,” Autor pointed out. One way to change this would be to raise taxes on capital and reduce taxes on labor: that would make the code more neutral. A more drastic and more politically challenging option, which Autor said is worth considering, would be to tax consumption rather than working.

Part of the report that particularly caught my eye is a section titled “Discouraging expertise theft.” Right now, A.I. companies “freely scrape content from websites, social media, YouTube, newspapers, Wikipedia, and blogs, then statistically recombine this material and sell access to the results,” the report notes. “Authors, journalists, visual artists, musicians, translators, and countless other creators find their work appropriated as training data, with no compensation or control.” A recently published book, “The Means of Prediction,” by an Oxford economist, Maximilian Kasy, likens this grab to the enclosure of common land by landlords during medieval times—a development which greatly benefitted the landlords but destroyed the livelihoods of many small farmers. “A lot of the internet is being enclosed and resold to us as private property,” Autor said. “This is a huge reallocation of property rights.” With some firms using the performance of their own employees as data to train A.I. models, the report argues that the appropriation issue goes well beyond the internet: “Few employees would willingly train an apprentice designed to replace them, and yet this is precisely what happens when companies use worker expertise to build automation systems.”

To address this issue, the report calls for new “legal frameworks that support workers’ ownership of their capabilities and creative output.” That sounds good, but what would it mean in practice? One model could be the book-publishing industry, where Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a class-action lawsuit filed by authors and publishers for copyright infringement. (Like many writers, I have filed claims under this settlement.) But lawsuits are, at best, a very limited solution. The expertise of most cognitive workers—doctors, teachers, lawyers, consultants, accountants, software programmers, and so on—isn’t copyrighted. Neither are the physical skills that packers, drivers, builders, and other blue-collar workers possess, and which robotics companies are busy trying to replicate.

This broader threat of appropriation and immiseration demands broader policy responses, and Autor suggested two of them: wage insurance for workers displaced by A.I. and a universal basic capital endowment. Under the first proposal, which Autor said is based on a trade-adjustment policy implemented by the Obama Administration, workers who are made redundant by A.I. and are forced to take lower-paying jobs, would receive a temporary federal wage subsidy. The proposed universal basic capital endowment would be made available to everyone. At birth, they would receive a government-funded investment account—the idea being that it could eventually grow large enough to provide them with a supplementary income source that wasn’t dependent on them supplying labor.

Proposals of this nature have long been popular on parts of the left, where they are sometimes referred to as asset-based redistribution. More recently, in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, Donald Trump appropriated the appeal, if not the substance, of this approach by establishing tax-advantaged investment accounts for Americans born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028, which the federal government will “seed” with a thousand-dollar contribution. To have a real impact on people’s lives and incomes, a universal basic capital endowment would have to be much larger than the Trump accounts, and it would likely have to be financed by raising taxes on large agglomerations of wealth. Autor didn’t get into financing details, but toward the end of our talk he pointed out two facts about the modern U.S. economy that were evident even before the onset of A.I.: wealth ownership is highly concentrated (the richest one per cent of households own more than thirty per cent of total wealth) and the share of national income accruing to workers rather than owners of capital is falling sharply (since 2000, it has dropped by about ten percentage points).

On its current course, A.I. seems likely to accentuate both these trends, with alarming implications for inequality, welfare, and democracy. It’s easy to question whether the proposals that Autor and his colleagues have put forward are adequate to address this challenge—he freely admitted that they don’t have an “omnibus solution”—but at least they are tackling the right questions. ♦